Christine Geraghty's book on the adaptation of literature into film comes like a breath of fresh critical air. She knows that the antecedent text can't be ignored, but she places the film in what may well be much more revealing contexts. Geraghty has not only chosen an imposing and unexpected range of literary texts and the films derived from them (from The Last of the Mohicans to Ulysses), but she also views them from new perspectives. Her emphasis is rewardingly on the films themselves and on their contexts: art-house cinema, the half-way house cinema of 'heritage filmmaking,' European independent film, or British New Wave. Adapted films, as Geraghty makes plain, will be read in radically different ways if the viewer has more in mind than a slavish concern for what has been 'done' to the earlier text. This is an important book, scholarly and stimulating and entirely readable.

- Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia, and the University of Hull, United Kingdom,